I've got an old Beige G3 on which I'm currently installing Gentoo that has the builtin atyfb and an addon PCI aty128fb. I've not yet gotten to the point where Gentoo boots on its own -- I'm still at the install stage and booting solely from BootX to the installation kernel and ramdisk on the 1.2 iso -- but I cannot get Linux to boot using the aty128fb (which is really the only one with a monitor attached -- MacOS 9 understands that properly without tweaking) without selecting the ``No Video Driver'' option, which makes the console remarkably slow and slightly buggy when dealing with the amounts of text that the install process throws at it. I've tried this tip, but it didn't help (and, yes, I did use the correct driver names, assuming that atyfb and aty128fb are, in fact, the correct driver names).

Anyone have any ideas? It's not a huge deal for the install process (despite the fact that I feel certain that the install would go faster if were able to scrolling text were able to keep up), but I would like to get it fixed by the time I get the system up and running, even if it's using a userland utility on boot._________________Bitt

I figured out the switching to another console thing right after I posted, and it did speed things up. Thanks for the tip, anyway, though.

I just got through compiling a kernel with only aty128fb support, and it's closer, as I can see things trying to happen (and it is moving faster), but instead of characters on the console, I'm seeing the chracters replaced with squares of a variety of colors with dots in them, as if the font is wrong and color codes are being interpreted incorrectly. The pattern appears to be correct, based on what I can remember (I can see the `[ok]' pattern on the right side of the screen and the bullet and text on the left), but it's unreadable, as there are no letters on the screen whatsoever, mostly dots, and the occasional circle or empty but colored square.

The rest of the screen, though, shows rectangles of a variety of colors, each with either a solid black dot, a black circle of approximately the same diameter as the dot, or nothing. Each of these rectangles is the same size as what a normal character should be. I've been trying specifying different fonts to the kernel (via ``video=aty128fb:font:VGA8x8'' or whatever other font I might try) and I just noticed that the size of the rectangles changes when I use a font of a different size. The standard seems to be 8x16 or so; it becomes much shorter when I use ``VGA8x8'' and much larger all over when I use SUN12x22 (in fact, the SUN12x22 doesn't have the black dots, it has black rectanges).

I just noticed that when Gentoo loads the font during the bootup sequence, the font definitely changes. The SUN12x22 font is very large, and that font selection changes it back to a normal sized font (or set of rectangles, anyway).

Interestingly, the ProFont6x11 font listed in menuconfig as being appropriate for Macs seems to confuse it entirely. When I tell the kernel to use that one, there are the rectangles to the right of Tux, but below him it is just black, to the point of even cutting off the lower part of the font-rectangle of the last line next to Tux.

All of this would seem to indicate that it's unable to load fonts correctly. This video card is sort of a test model, so maybe it's possible that the card is acting funny. Regardless, if anyone has any more ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Oh, and specifying a video mode (via ``640x480@75'', for example) seems to work fine and change the resolution to what is specified. Interestingly, it seems that if I specify a color depth (``640x480-32@75'', for example), the colormap on Tux is screwed up, though I can still make him out easily. The rest of the font-rectangles seem to be the same colors they were without specifying the depth, though, but I could be wrong about that._________________Bitt

Well that's funny: just copying and pasting my kernel args into this window revealed a non-printing character. Invisible in the BootX window, but showed up as a block in this window. Just tried booting to linux (after removing the non-printing char of course) in 1024x768 console, which does work now! Thanx for getting me to the point of copy-pasting the line _________________Lukas

Oops, no. Meant to mention that, but forgot to, what with all my rambling about fonts.

I did try noaccel and it didn't do anything. However, I just noticed in some docs that aty128fb defaults to noaccel. I'll try throwing an accel at it and see what happens, not that I can imagine that it will help.

Nope. No difference. At least it wasn't worse.

I just noticed that the ProFont font actually doesn't do what I implied before. It seems to just display some leftover data in the framebuffer in the upper portion of the screen. It just happened that Tux was there when I tested before. This time, it wasn't.

This doesn't seem to be going too well. Thanks for everyone's help, though._________________Bitt